The best cellphone list of 2015-16 has still been dominated by the iPhones, though Android devices are slowly and steadily catching up. Google has rapidly iterated on the Android Operating system which has been paired by hardware manufacturers - most notably Samsung, to create stunning and powerful smart phones competing with the latest iPhones.

2016 should hopefully bring the Android side on parity with the iPhones - maybe beat it even. Also, 2016 saw the best smartphones beat all other computing devices in sheer computing power. The best cellphones of 2016 now routinely come with Quad and Octa Core processors and super 4.5 inch screens at cheaper prices. This trend should continue in 2016 and hopefully with bigger screen sizes smartphones will start taking on more office productivity functions and replace low-end notebooks and netbooks.

The best cell phone list of 2016 below is based on reviews from over a hundred different experts and ranked by our patent-pending algorithms. This list is also updated once a month to make sure the recommendations are accurate.

Feature phones are the basic cellphones necessary for voice calling and text messaging arriving in different form factors like flip, candybar, QWERTY, swivel and sometimes touchscreens too. These cellphones generally run on a software developed by the hardware manufacturer itself. Feature phones generally have lower screen sizes and limited features available at lower costs.

Android, an open source platform for mobile devices developed by Google accounts for 52% of smartphone sales in US market and 75% globally. The smartphones running on Android are powerful; affordable to most since it is a free operating system and hence it is the most popular smartphone operating system today.

With the ability to access over a million apps and games on Play Store, along with the millions of songs and books, and thousands of movies. Android being a product of Google, you could get various integrated useful Google apps specially designed for the operating system: Play Store, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google+ and Google Drive (a cloud service from Google).

Bigger screen cellphones generally offer higher resolutions like 1280x720 (720p) or 1920x1080 (1080p), which are of high definition (HD) format. Smartphones come with bigger screens sizes, greater than 4 inch and range up to 5.5 inch useful for watching videos, reading books and playing games. Combining the functionalities of smartphone and a tablet, the touchscreen smartphones having screen sizes between 5 inch and 7 inch are termed as Phablets.

Battery life, the most important for a mobile device for functioning all the day, is measured in terms of standby time or talktime. Most of the battery power is utilized for multimedia purposes when your screen, camera and speaker are in use. And if it is a smartphone, it is your processor and the 3G or 4G networks which are responsible for draining of your battery. Lower-end phones offer battery life upto 10 hours and just the half of it from smartphones.

For capturing pictures, you can get a phone with better camera as you pay more from a basic VGA resolution to a 13 megapixel resolution and more. And a greater resolution camera doesn't always translate the better image: meaning a good quality lens and a great image processor are at the core.

If you are buying a cellphone with a contract, or the one which is unlocked, the carrier you choose should be able to provide you a wide network coverage, high data speed, flexible talk time, SMS and data plans. And for mobile internet access, most of the carriers in US support 3G and 4G LTE network for faster data speeds. Since you may change your mind buying a new cellphone before your contract expires, you can prefer spending much on a unlocked phone rather than a cellphone with contract.

Major carriers in US: AT&T and T-Mobile support GSM network, and Verizon and Sprint are support CDMA network. Since GSM is a global technology standard, the best GSM cellphones support international roaming and can be unlockable sometimes. Whereas CDMA cellphones are known to have limited international coverage and are difficult to unlock.